Journal of Public Affairs Education

Community Impact of Nonprofit Graduate Students’ Service-Learning Projects
nonprofit organizations. This paper also reviews capacity building and
nonprofit evaluation tools and methods that can be used in future studies of
community impact.
Nonprofit Management Education Literature
Much of the literature on graduate nonprofit management education focuses
on the development of the field, classroom curriculum, and student or alumni
learning outcomes (Fletcher, 2005; Mirabella & Wish, 2000; O’Neill, 2005;
O’Neill & Fletcher, 1998; O’Neill & Young, 1988; Wilson & Larson, 2002).
Several recent academic conferences were organized to discuss nonprofit management
education (Ashcraft, 2007; Burlingame & Hammack, 2005), and scholars have
written articles about the number of nonprofit graduate degree programs (Mirabella,
2007; Wish & Mirabella, 1998), where they are housed, (Dobkin Hall, O’Neill,
Vinokur-Kaplan, Young, & Lane, 2001; Mirabella & Wish, 2001) and the types
of courses offered (Mirabella, 2007).
Conventional wisdom holds that nonprofit management education is important
for educating nonprofit managers. Yet very few studies have evaluated the impact
of nonprofit-focused graduate programs on the nonprofit organizations themselves.
This could be done by studying the impact that graduate students’ service-learning
projects have on the nonprofits for which they are conducted. In this section,
two studies that attempted to evaluate the community impact of nonprofit graduate
students’ service-learning projects are discussed. A third study that assessed
the overall community impact of several nonprofit graduate degree programs
is also discussed.
The first study evaluated the community impact of a “Nonprofit Clinic” at
the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs
(GSPIA) by studying the impact of graduate student projects conducted through
the Nonprofit Clinic (Bright, Bright, & Haley, 2007). Although the Nonprofit
Clinic is not connected to a specific nonprofit management education program,
it engages graduate students in a variety of service-learning projects within the
local nonprofit community. Local nonprofit organizations submit requests for
proposal (RFPs) to receive technical assistance from the clinic. Then clinic staff
assigns faculty members and students to semester-long projects.
To assess the impact of these service-learning projects, which they labeled as
technical assistance projects, researchers administered surveys to seven nonprofit
organizations that had received service from the clinic. The survey assessed
satisfaction with technical assistance, benefits to receiving the technical assistance,
organizational improvement as a result of the technical assistance, and interest
in future involvement with the clinic. Of the respondents, 86% “[saw] significant
improvements in their organizations since they received support from the
Nonprofit Clinic” (Bright et al., 2007, p. 204), and the “services helped [these
organizations] focus their attention on the critical issues [that] they were facing”
116 Journal of Public Affairs Education